Yet over the details hangs an even more fundamental question: who, exactly, is running Iran?
For some, this state of affairs means driving home the U.S. advantage by continuing to target leaders opposed to a negotiated settlement, the apparent assumption being that sustained economic and military pressure will ultimately deepen divisions in Tehran and force a more favorable outcome in bilateral talks.
All of which reveals the answer to the question posed above: in the post-Ali Khamenei reality, power in Tehran has not reorganized around a single, dominant leader. Yes, Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader, formally holds the position at the apex of authority. But he is not his father; power previously concentrated in the Supreme Leader’s office is now distributed among a narrow circle of military, security, and political figures whose portfolios and responsibilities increasingly overlap.
So where does Khamenei Jr. fit into this new architecture of power? To be sure, Mojtaba, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war and has a vast network among security and military actors, is at the center of this new architecture of power. He matters because he represents absolute continuity at a time of profound crises when the Islamic Republic cannot afford ambiguity over its ideological center.
For most of his life, Mojtaba was not regarded as a religious scholar of significant theological authority or scholarly distinction. It was only in 2022, as conversations about the succession of his ageing and ailing father grew more urgent, that he was conferred the title of ayatollah, a prerequisite for the position of Supreme Leader. Mojtaba’s public profile has been shaped less by formal office than by his influence within his father’s inner circle and his relationships with the country’s security networks. His elevation provides continuity for the system, but it does not offer a singular, commanding leader.
Pillars of power
With the Supreme Leader no longer the sole authority, the man acting as a bridge between the military and political spheres of this revamped architecture of decision-making in Iran is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who has repeatedly adapted his public identity to the needs of the moment. He has served in almost every major institution in the Islamic Republic: an IRGC commander during the Iran-Iraq war, chief of the Iranian police, Mayor of Tehran for 12 years, a presidential candidate, and the speaker of the Parliament since 2020.
Ghalibaf is ambitious, and his professional journey shows that he has long sought higher office. Contrary to what many outside the country—and some Iranians as well—might imagine, his importance in the current structure does not come from his ability to dominate others. He is valuable because of his ability to make the different parts of the system work together. He can engage more pragmatic elements inside the state, while remaining credible to the security establishment—a critical constituency in Iran.
After the 12-Day War of June 2025 inflicted significant losses on the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made changes to the IRGC leadership and appointed Mohammad Pakpour as its commander in chief, with Vahidi as the deputy commander, a position he held until Pakpour’s killing in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28. Now at the helm, Vahidi represents another facet of the new power structure in Iran. Unlike Ghalibaf, he has never sought to soften or obscure his identity as a man of the security establishment.
Beyond the individual personalities, the most important institution coordinating Iran’s security and foreign policy priorities amid the war is the Supreme National Security Council. The council used to be led by Ali Larijani, the formidable political operator and confidant of Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March. His replacement, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, personifies another shift in the Iranian system’s center of gravity, away from political management and toward security-bureaucratic coordination.
His trajectory has been less about battlefield command than about something arguably more durable: embedding security logic into the institutions of the state. In the current configuration, that is precisely his value. Zolghadr is the connective tissue of the system, a figure whose role is to ensure that the political, judicial, military, and security arms of the Islamic Republic remain in alignment with one another.
One of the men who helped develop this strategy is Ali Akbar Ahmadian. He served as a naval commander in the IRGC, commanded the organization’s strategic center for years, and served as the chief of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. After the 12-Day War, the Islamic Republic established a Defense Council to institutionalize war planning—a body which Ahmadian serves as acting secretary. He represents the doctrinal layer of the system and plays a more strategic role.
Meanwhile, wars demand complex machinery. The organization responsible for coordinating and managing operations between the IRGC and the regular Iranian army in wartime is known as the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters. The man who runs it, and who completes the operational layer of this command structure, is Ali Abdollahi, an officer whose career spans the IRGC, the national police, the Interior Ministry, and the logistics and operational coordination bureaucracies that hold a wartime state together. He does not make strategy. He makes strategy work.
Why the center holds
Ensuring that the security framework is fit for purpose also means keeping a lid on domestic opposition amid the war—a job that now falls to Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of the country’s judiciary. To achieve his goals, he has been using Iran’s sprawling, politically weaponized legal system to prosecute protesters and dissidents, issue warnings against dissent, threaten harsher wartime punishments, and increasingly execute prisoners.
It’s clear to me that they are being consulted regularly by the current leadership, which once again helps explain why authority in the Islamic Republic does not solely depend on formal office. In a system where senior commanders have been killed in targeted strikes and certain positions have been left deliberately ambiguous, influence can still flow through relationships built over decades.
Indeed, over the past several months, the Islamic Republic has responded to pressure not by simplifying its structure of authority, but by multiplying and obscuring the channels through which authority is exercised. Some positions have been filled quickly; others have been left formally vacant, their functions quietly redistributed; and new or revived wartime bodies have assumed an importance that their low visibility belies. The purpose has been to preserve institutional continuity while reducing the vulnerability that comes with concentrating power in any single node.
This is why internal differences within the system do not amount to paralysis. But under wartime conditions, these distinctions are contained by a fundamental consensus: the system must survive, the IRGC must remain cohesive, and the war must not end in a way that invites another round of attacks. Disagreements may sharpen after the war, especially over the distribution of political and economic power among different factions. For now, however, they operate within a shared framework rather than against it.
For now, Iran is not being governed by a single man susceptible to pressure, isolation, or removal. It is being run by a hardened network that has made itself less visible, more collective in its decision-making, and more difficult to coerce. The architecture is the point. Understanding it matters more than counting the names at the top.
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